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Gardeners' Notes:

This little shrub is the smallest species of Banksia (named after Sir Joseph Banks). A large genus of proteaceous shrubs and trees, with large spectacular heads of flowers, which are full of nectar.
Meissner's Banksia is named after Carl Freidrich Meissner, a Swiss botanist. It grows in a limited area in the South-West of Western Australia.
It grows naturally in deep sands often near swampy ground. I planted mine in a raised bed with a well-drained sandy loam and it is doing very well, flowering every spring.
Banksias grow easily from seed, but the seed is very hard to extract from the cones, which hold seed on the shrub almost indefinitely.
Naturally, seed is released if the shrub is burned in a fire. I recently extracted some seed by placing a cone in an oven at 120 degrees Celsius for 1 hour. Even then the seed capsule did not open, but I was able to dismember the cone and extract some seed.